Empirical pedagogical dictionaries aim at defining words in their context and presenting corpus-based evidence for each word. They are meant to teach language learners how to use a word correctly. Valency, which describes the arguments of a verb syntactically and semantically, is of unique importance to pedagogical dictionaries. Unfortunately, Arabic lacks corpus-based valency resources. Thus, this paper proposes a monolingual corpus-based valency dictionary, for Arabic learners, covering fighting verbs. The dictionary explores the valency of fighting verbs in Sketch Engine's uploaded Arabic TenTen corpus. The dictionary compiling method depends on both automatic word sketch function to identify the lexico-syntactic patterns of verbs and on threelayer manual annotation of corpus-driven examples to consolidate the results. Each verb entry, in the dictionary, displays (a) number; (b) phrase type; (c) semantic role; (d) grammatical function of its arguments and (e) definition of its different senses. At least, three annotated examples are provided for each verb sense to illustrate its usage authentically. The dictionary, integrating semantic and syntactic information, facilitates effective learning of new Arabic vocabulary.
Language and psychology have much in common in the sense that each of these two disciplines can be used to study the features of the other one. Words that people use every day carry a lot of explicit linguistic features which signal some implicit psychological traits, personal characteristics, social relations and cognitive processes. Since more attention has been recently paid to such an area of research, this study investigates linguistic and psychological features used as indicators of veracity or deception.
The study examines selected speeches of the last five Egyptian and American presidents using a computerized content analysis tool called LIWC (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count). Drawing on previous researches that examine the psychometrics of the language, this study follows an eclectic approach adopting Newman et al.'s model combined with other cues to deceptionconcluded by other studies. The analysis detects the frequency of using pronouns, negation, exclusive words, details, conjunctions and big words in the speeches in order to reveal instances of deception.
The growing literature on the use of social media for social protests generally, and during the Arab Spring in particular, has generally failed to show a periphery-inclusive perspective. This article employs statistical data on the use of alternative media outlets (Facebook, Twitter, blogs and YouTube) in Egypt's spring to show how an alternative media structure was expanding which not only empowered social and geographic peripheral actors but was, in turn, also empowered by their contributions. YouTube videos and Twitter messages from peripheral areas exposed police brutality towards protestors in the backstreets that could otherwise have been unnoticed and saved lives in isolated areas in Egypt. Social media thus gained critical mass and expanded to the point that it had an overflow effect from the virtual sphere to the real world. Contrasting the roles of alternative and state-run media machines in different phases of the revolution, the article traces how peripheries could challenge the existing opportunity structure through alternative media, but also how their role has contracted again after the revolution reached its peak.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.